Decline of a Civilization

By Miroslav Krleza, 1932, “The Return Of Filip Latinovicz”

People are passing by, carrying within them, in their dark intestines, a mixture of the heads and legs of boiled fowl, the dreary eyes of birds, cow’s buttocks, and horses’ haunches, while only the night before those same animals were cheerfully swinging their tails – the hens squawking in the hen house on the very eve of their death. Now, everything has found its way into the human intestines. All this movement and gluttony is, to sum it up, the life in the western European cities, the dusk of an old civilization.